Nightmare Realm Summoner: A LitRPG Adventure, page 33
“No questions from the bleedin’ bystanders.” Claire nabbed the pillow and stuck it behind her back. “Wake me up if anything happens?”
“Will do,” Alex said. “Good luck. And don’t forget—”
“The stuff we talked about?” Claire’s face grew serious, and she nodded. “Oh, trust me. I won’t.”
She closed her eyes and slipped into meditation, leaving Alex in silence.
Minutes ticked by. The moon pushed its rays through the murky window and traced designs across the floor, using the dirt on the glass like hands in a shadow puppet show. Shapes and figures scrawled past on the ground.
Alex’s gaze eventually started to drift. He briefly deactivated his bracelet for just long enough to pull a crumpled dollar from his pocket. It was one of the ones he’d taken from Jackson, crumpled and smeared with dry blood.
He rolled the paper into a ball between his fingers and tossed it from hand to hand. It had been a long time since there had been a proper moment of quiet after the apocalypse had started. He barely remembered the last time he hadn’t been about an inch away from collapsing in exhaustion.
I’m not so sure I like the silence. I’d go to sleep if I could, but I’d rather wait until Claire finishes up her own meditation—and I’m not really all that tired.
His senses extended to the magical energy within him. Power prickled against his insides and coiled within his veins. At the very least, he could spend some time familiarizing himself with Funhouse.
Alex lifted a hand and drew on his energy. Just as it flowed when he used Glint’s powers, magic rushed to respond to Alex’s call. The air before him rippled like a haze rising from desert sand.
Then, with the distant tinkling sound of falling glass, it cracked. Lines of distortion lurched out until their growing spiderweb was roughly the size of a large beach ball. Fragments jutted out of the air like someone had dropped a heavy rock on a mirror and locked it in time before any of the pieces could fall back to the ground.
Alex peered through the warped air. He could still see the bed behind it, but it was like looking through a poorly made kaleidoscope. Half of Claire’s body was up above her head, and portions of the bed had filled in her midsection.
He moved to the side to get another look at how she actually looked before peering through the distortion once more. Alex extended a hand, then paused just inches away from it. He pulled his hand back, then flicked the crumpled dollar into the magic.
The paper ball struck one of the fragments in the distortion and abruptly changed directions, flying to the side and colliding with another fragment. It changed direction once more, struck yet another fragment, and was redirected twice more before it was spat out to fall at Alex’s feet.
“Huh,” Alex said, kneeling to pick his dollar up again. A faint prickle at the back of his mind reminded him that he was losing energy as long as the warped space remained present in the air, but he ignored it.
He tossed the dollar into the distortion again. It flicked out to the right. Alex continued to repeat the process. He did his best to replicate his throws as closely as he could. It didn’t matter. The paper came out in a different direction each time.
But while it seemed almost random, Alex was nearly certain it was anything but. The fragments acted the same way every time something passed through them. What changed was the angle at which his dollar struck them. Even the slightest shift in speed or direction completely changed where something would enter and emerge.
Alex lost count of the number of times he flicked his test dollar into Funhouse. He didn’t have anything better to do. His boredom spurred the intensity of his studies more than any teacher ever could have.
Time dragged by. His results continued to be seemingly random, even though his conviction that they weren’t only continued to grow. The only way to prove his theory was to actually replicate a throw multiple times and have the dollar land in the spot each time.
It was fortunate he had nothing better to do.
As most things worthwhile, improvement was an insidious beast. Several throws landed his dollar in the same area, but they weren’t consecutive, and it was difficult to tell if the results had been intentional or not.
It took nearly an hour before he got the dollar to land in the exact same place twice in a row, but it was only another thirty minutes before he managed to replicate the process twice. A grin pulled across Alex’s lips.
Funhouse looks like it basically acts like a bunch of really tiny portals. Every single fragment is like a different passage through space. If I can figure out exactly which ones connect where, I can basically determine exactly where objects passing through it end up… but what happens when something bigger than a single fragment passes through it? Is it determined by the first fragment they touch? Or does each one change the trajectory on its own?
There was only one way to find out. Alex deactivated his bracelet for the second time and pulled his torn and bloodied shirt off, balling it up and tossing the whole thing into the area he’d cast Funhouse over.
The shirt stretched from fragment to fragment. It jerked and twisted like a jellyfish in a blender. Every time any part of it touched a fragment, it was pulled in an entirely new direction. The scrap of cloth eventually fluttered out the bottom of the warped space and splatted to the ground.
Alex stared down at it. It hadn’t acted anywhere close to how the dollar had.
I see it was the latter option, then. Every touch with a fragment changes the trajectory. If I’m lucky, each fragment is tied to a specific direction.
He had a lot of research ahead of him. Distilling exactly how the ability worked to the point where he could completely master it would take a very long time. There were so many different variables and potential outcomes.
A small grin pulled at the corners of Alex’s lips.
I’m pretty sure someone a whole lot smarter than me would say this is basically just some branch of physics, but this is more fun than school ever was.
Let’s see just how far I can push this ability.
43
Alex stepped forward. His chest buzzed as it impacted the cracks in reality, and his stomach shriveled like a raisin. He stumbled. His foot hit the ground. He stepped free of the warped space as if nothing had been in his path, left with only a mild, fading discomfort.
Did I hit it at just the right angle to end up passing straight through? Unlikely, but hypothetically just as possible as getting sent out in every other direction. So I guess it’s technically no less likely than any other option—unless the fragments have different weights to the direction they send you in?
Oh, fuck it.
Alex stepped back into his magic. His stomach twisted, his foot fell, and he stepped through Funhouse for the second time, arriving exactly where he’d been aiming to.
I see. So it either doesn’t work on humans, or it doesn’t work on things bigger than it.
Alex focused on his connection to the magical cracks splitting the air before them. He’d already burned through a fair amount of the magic he had to work with. It seemed that Funhouse drew power purely just to keep it active, and it didn’t care what happened within it.
He pushed more magic into the warped zone. Cold fingers wrapped around his brainstem, and his teeth clenched. Blood thumped in Alex’s ears, and the chill spread through his body.
The cracks in the air expanded in every direction. Even though the magic was soundless, power hummed in Alex’s skull. His energy drained away rapidly as he expanded the space that the fracture in reality occupied.
What had once been enough magic to last him another few minutes without any troubles was now on course to deplete within seconds. There was no time for him to wait around. As soon as the space Funhouse occupied was larger than he was, Alex strode into it.
The world jerked.
Color blurred. His foot hit the ground behind him. His hands went one direction; his head went another. Each of his fingers set off on their own journey. His entire body seemed to split at the seams.
Then it snapped back together.
A wave of dizziness slammed into Alex like a freight train, and the ground rushed up to meet him.
He grabbed onto the bedframe at the last second, just barely managing to catch himself before he slammed face-first into the floor. As quickly as it had come, the disorientation peeled away from his mind.
Something popped in the back of Alex’s mind. His connection to the magic snapped like a taut rubber band that had been cut. The cracks in reality reversed themselves, stitching the air back to normal.
Alex slowly pushed himself back to his feet. Funhouse had spat him out at an angle. It had used pretty much all of the power he’d had left to get the magic big enough to actually fit a human into it, but at least he’d confirmed that it worked.
I definitely feel like I have more magic than I did before I leveled up. I suppose I’ll need even more if I want to use Funhouse to reliably mess with people’s positioning.
His head tilted to the side. That brought up yet another question. Alex wasn’t sure which aspect of leveling up was the one that gave him more magical power. It could have either been advancing his Mind Palace or just allocating his magic into advancing his skills.
I’ll test it whenever I next get enough energy to level up again. I imagine that I should be getting more than enough during the upcoming Initialization event.
Alex glanced over at Claire. Her eyes were still closed in meditation. He couldn’t quite remember how long it had been since she’d started. Leaning forward slightly, he squinted through the dirty window and at the night sky beyond it.
The moon hung in the air above, well on its way back to the horizon. Distant pricks of faint yellow and white splayed across the dark sky like droplets of spilled paint. They were strikingly large. It struck him that the sky had never been this clear back before the Apocalypse—nor had the stars ever been so close. They were almost three or four times larger than what he remembered.
Did all the smog and pollution really vanish that quickly? I wouldn’t have thought it would happen that quickly, but what do I know?
Alex carefully climbed onto the bed, taking care not to disturb Claire from her meditation, and made his way over to the window. He grabbed the old, rusted latch holding it shut and gave it a sharp tug.
The metal let out a small screech as the handle ground open, then popped free of its lock. Alex swung the window open and poked his head out of the building to get a better look at the night sky.
He blinked in surprise. There had been so much dirt on the window that it had almost been acting like a makeshift shade. The night was even brighter than he’d thought. Silver shone down from the stars and illuminated Towntown with such intensity that the night could have been mistaken for an overcast day.
A shadow passed across the streets.
Alex jerked his eyes back to the sky. A coil of darkness engulfed one of the stars, and its light was snuffed out. All that remained where it had been was an empty patch in the sky amid the blinking lights.
It wasn’t the only one.
All around, stars vanished. They were plucked from their rest and swallowed by darkness one after the other. Within mere seconds, nearly a third of them had vanished.
That was when the screaming started.
A keening wail filled the air and pierced into Alex’s ears, threatening to rupture them. He nearly leapt out of his own skin in his haste to jab his fingers into his ears and block the noise out.
The effort almost felt moot. The noise intensified in spite of him. Agony drove into his skull. It wormed past his fingers and gripped at his brain, trying to shake it free from his spine.
Claire’s eyes snapped open. She rolled out of bed and dropped to the floor, plugging her own ears and crouching. Her mouth moved as she yelled something, but Alex couldn’t hear anything over the incessant screech.
A rattle gripped the walls and worked into the floor beneath their feet. It intensified into a tremble. The bedframe started to shake beside them, and the window banged shut, shattering and raining glass down on top of the bed.
Alex rolled under the bed, taking shelter beneath it, and Claire mirrored him. The ground bucked and heaved beneath them. It threw Alex’s back into the wooden frame above him, and he covered his head with his hands to protect it.
He’d never gotten a chance to use the earthquake training he’d gotten in school, but something told him this wasn’t exactly the situation that his teachers had been envisioning.
The tremors grew stronger. Alex felt the rough carpet pressed against his skin shudder as something cracked beneath it. The floor started to dip beneath them. It felt like the very building was being ripped apart.
Still, the screaming grew louder.
Alex would have rolled free of the bed if he’d been able to find any purchase on the ground. That was a little difficult to do when his body was doing its best ping-pong ball impression between the carpet and the bed above him.
A brilliant flash flooded the room with bright white light. An instant later, the screaming gave way to a muted, distant crash. The entire building trembled, and then there was silence.
Distant ringing swallowed his ears. The world danced around him. Something wet trickled down the side of Alex’s cheek. He reached up to the side of his face, and his fingers came away red.
Alex dragged himself out from under the bed, moving on all fours. He clawed onto the side of the bed and dragged himself up. The blood running down the sides of his face dripped from his chin.
Claire dragged herself up beside him. Her lips moved once more. This time, Alex could just barely pick out a whisper of sound. His magically enhanced body was already healing the damage his ears had taken. He didn’t wait around for his hearing to return. He fell onto the bed, the world still swaying around him, and dragged himself over to the window. Fallen glass shards littering the bed jabbed into his skin.
He grabbed onto a part of the frame, avoiding the remainder of the glass jutting out from the remains of the window, and peered out of the building. His eyes went wide.
A huge white boulder the size of a house had crashed down in the center of Towntown. Twists of pallid smoke twisted up from the meteor. Its pockmarked surface glowed like a miniature sun and forced Alex to tear his eyes away from it.
His ears popped.
“What the bleeding hell is that?” Claire’s voice reached his ears, little more than a whisper but growing louder with every word.
“I… think it’s a star.”
“What?” Claire screamed into his ear, practically bursting his eardrum a second time. Alex flinched. It looked like his hearing had returned faster than hers because of the amount of energy he’d poured into his Mind Palace.
“It’s a star!” Alex yelled back.
“God, you don’t have to yell,” Claire said, rubbing at her ears and taking a step back. “I don’t have any idea what the fuck is going on, but we’d better get out of this building before—”
A loud crunch split the air. They both spun back to the window and stared down at the street. Cracks ran throughout the pavement, growing at a rapid pace. A large chunk of the ground bulged upward. Rivers of debris rolled down it as a skeletal hand the size of a large dog burst free of the ground and slammed down, its bony fingers digging into stone and finding purchase. Rivers of silver energy shimmered around the bone like translucent skin.
The ground was broken a second time as another hand burst free on the other side of the mound. Two more hands followed it, and more bulges started to form all along the street. Alex and Claire backed away from the window and exchanged a glance.
Neither of them got a chance to say another word. A chime rang in Alex’s ears.
Local Announcement for Subsector 735
Part 2/3 of the System’s initialization has begun. Cull the Meek has been assigned to all intelligent lifeforms within the Trial areas. The Local Leaderboard has been initiated.
[Trial Assigned: Cull the Meek]
Objective: Survive.
44
Alex and Claire raced from their room, practically flying down the steps in their haste to get out of the apartment. With the amount of shaking the old building had just gone through, it was probably more likely to kill them than any monster was.
It seemed that everyone else had similar ideas. Survivors raced out of the lobby all around them, sprinting into the street. He and Claire joined the river of people escaping the building.
People scrambled for their weapons, and screams rang through the air all around them. Whether they were from terror or combat, Alex couldn’t tell.
“Form a line! Stop running off like idiots and stand your ground!” Ben’s voice echoed through the night. He stood in the center of the street, his axe raised high into the air like a flag. “If we panic, we’re going to just get cut down one by one!”
“They’re past the damn barricades!” a long-haired man screamed as he struggled to pull his shirt on and hopped from foot to foot, staring at the ground as if something was about to jump up from beneath him—which, in his favor, seemed to be entirely possible.
“I think we’ve figured that bit out!” Ben yelled back. He slammed his axe into the ground with enough force to crack the street beneath him. “Now get your shit together, Isaiah! And put your damn pants on the right way. You’re going to trip over yourself again.”
Alex and Claire pushed through the crowd, which proved to be surprisingly easy to do. There weren’t anywhere near as many survivors as Alex had expected to find. The street was populated, but given the number of people in the town, it seemed as if less than half of them were present.
The sounds of combat rang through the air all around them as Towntown was plunged into a fight. Despite Ben’s best efforts, people weren’t working well together. Alex hadn’t even managed to spot a single monster since he’d stepped out, but people were running screaming instead of gathering to fight at choke points.
